


Simple as a Kettle; Steady as a Rock

by Wonderlandleighleigh



Series: Just This Once, Everybody Lives [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, WinterWidow is better than you, non-graphic sexytimes, trigger warning: suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 12:12:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18828445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wonderlandleighleigh/pseuds/Wonderlandleighleigh
Summary: Timing is everything. It just takes Bucky and Natasha nearly twenty years to get it right.





	Simple as a Kettle; Steady as a Rock

**Author's Note:**

> Anything in _italics_ is said in Russian.

2004

It’s weird, Natalia thinks, that what’s left of the Soviet Union has latched onto Hydra. 

She wonders about it sometimes, as she’s completing objectives. 

But she doesn't wonder for very long. There just isn’t much time. She’s constantly on assignment. Constantly working. Constantly distracted by the task at hand.

But she does, sometimes.

Her new mission is different. Straight-forward, for once. 

Pose as a newlywed couple. Gather all the information available (personal, professional and otherwise) on Anita Jones.

And then kill her.

It’ll be a year and a half undercover as Natalie Brown. 

And her husband, Joe. 

They’ve yanked the Asset out of cryo for this; cleaned him up and put a skin substitute on his metal arm. Natalia isn’t quite sure why they’ve chosen the Asset. She wonders if it’s his sweet, trustworthy face and no she did not just think that to herself the Asset is the Asset and this is a job, and it doesn’t matter why they’ve chosen the two of them, or that he’s muscular, or that his eyes are that deep blue that people write about in songs.

All that matters is the mission.

*****

They’re settled in upstate New York, along the Hudson River Valley. Their covers are simple. Everything about this mission is simple. 

Get close to Anita Jones. Become her friend. Get the intel they need. 

Kill her. 

Nobody said one way or the other whether she was supposed to get close to the Asset or not. She’s just supposed to be his young wife. He goes to his fake cover job. She stays home and tends to the garden. Tells people she’s a housewife; that they’re trying to have a baby, as strange and foreign as that feels.

But this is the mission. 

To hell with everything else.

Three months in and she’s having lunch with Anita Jones and her other neighborhood friends once a week. Occasional, leisurely sex with the Asset. They cook dinner together and watch television. They sometimes play card games. It passes the time.

It’s not a bad gig, all things considered. 

They go to a neighborhood cookout in July. The Fourth of July, where there are hot dogs and fireworks and kids running around. 

And the Asset seems…

Something seems different about him.

He’s enjoying himself. He eats four fully-loaded hot dogs and feeds a little to someone’s dog. 

He’s different.

When they get back to their house, she changes for bed, and he clicks on the television, sitting back to watch a news program, talking about Captain America, the Howling Commandos and the end of World War II. 

“If Steve Rogers were alive today,” the reporter says at the end of the broadcast. “He’d be 86 years old.” 

Natalia watches the reporters sign off, and then looks at the Asset, grinning a little, speaking in Russian. _“Captain America. What a joke.”_ She turns back to the TV and freezes as a black and white photo appears on screen. 

Captain America and his Howling Commandos. 

The one standing next to the Captain is deeply handsome. A big smile and dark hair.

She frowns and slowly turns to look at the Asset. She gets one final glimpse of the photo on screen before it slowly fades, and there’s no way to deny it. 

_“Who was that?”_ she asks in Russian. _“Was that you?”_

_“Not anymore,”_ he answers quickly. _“That man died a very long time ago, I think.”_

The air in the room thickens with tension, and she lets it go. She picks up the remote carefully, clicking the television off.

They go to bed without another word, and Natalia wonders if she’ll die tonight. If the ticking time bomb next to her will go off, and that will be that.

But she wakes up in the morning, and the mission continues. 

***** 

She wakes up at three in the morning a week later to find that the Asset is gone from his side of the bed. 

They’d had sex earlier in the night, but it had been different. 

He’d been different. 

Soft with her, and attentive, and more needy himself. Kissing her slow and searing. 

Natalia had thought it was nice. Different. Novel, even, but hadn’t thought much of it.

But now the Asset is gone, and she gets up quickly, pulling on shorts and a t-shirt to wander around their small house. 

She doesn’t find him. She steps outside, and into their backyard. Their little house isn’t far from the water, and on instinct, she wanders in that direction. 

When she finds him, he’s staring out at the cold, dark river, sitting on a rock with his service weapon next to him.

She stops not far from him, wrapping her arms around herself. Even in July, being this close to the water late at night makes things a little chilly. 

_“What are you doing out here?”_ she asks, and he answers in English.

“It’s beautiful out here,” he says. “It’s a nice place to die.” 

Natalia frowns deeply, stepping closer, doing her best to speak his language. “I...I suppose.” 

He looks at her, then, with tears in his eyes, the wind whipping long hair into his face and he shoves it away. “You’re young,” he tells her, giving her a sad grin. “You don’t get it yet. Someday you’ll understand.” 

“What will I understand?” she asks, inching ever closer, her eyes drifting from his face to the firearm. 

“That this was for the best,” he says, looking back out at the water. “It’s better this way.” 

There’s a beat, and then they both lunge for the gun at the same time, knocking it off the rock, now more concerned with fighting each other than grabbing it.

At least that’s how it seems. The Asset snatches it up when Natalia is distracted by a hard punch to her sternum that sends her stumbling back. 

He uncocks it, and holds it to the side of his head. 

“What are you doing?” she snaps. “Joe-” 

“My name,” he growls, teeth clenched, “is James.” Tears fall from his eyes. “James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, of the 107th Battalion and Howling Commandos, 3257038.” He squeezes his eyes shut and grips the gun tighter. “Now go back inside and pretend you knew nothing.” 

“That’s impossible,” she tells him, switching back to Russian. _“If you do this, they will know that I knew there were complications and they will kill me.”_ She pauses as she watches him falter. _“And they will find a way to bring you back to life. You’re too valuable. They’ll never let you die.”_

He drops his hand, and hangs his head. “Does it even matter?” he asks eventually, looking at her, his tears dried. “Look what they’ve done to us.” 

She says nothing. 

_“They’ve turned us into monsters,”_ he snaps in Russian. 

Natalia takes slow steps to stand in front of him, cupping his jaw gently.

_“They’ll never let you die. But you and I both know that there are other ways to stop existing,”_ she says softly. 

***** 

They keep working. 

They keep working and she keeps getting closer to Anita Jones and her family. Cookouts and weekend daytrips. 

Natalia get the information they need, on Anita’s family. Her father was a Howling Commando. Anita herself has been working for the State Department since the 80’s. 

In-between all of this, Natalia gets to know James. 

“What will you do once this is all over?” she asks him one night she lays in his arms. His flesh and blood fingers twist through her red hair gently and she likes it. No one has ever touched her the way James does. 

Not like she may break, but like she is beautiful. 

“I’m gonna cut my hair,” he tells her, a soft chuckle in his voice. 

They’ve decided to see this one last mission through, and then go back to Russia one last time to give their mission report. And when the time is right, they’ll disappear. It’s certainly not a perfect plan by any stretch of the imagination but it’ll have to do. 

“We’ll wing it,” James had promised. 

“You Americans and your winging it,” Natalia had grumbled.

But they’ll wing it.

***** 

It hits her when she’s watching him hand out candy to trick-or-treaters in October. 

That she probably loves him. 

When he closes the door, and turns to her, bucket of candy in hand, she yanks him close by the shirt collar and kisses him deeply. He drops the bucket, candy forgotten, and holds her close, his flesh and blood hand cupping the back of her head. 

When it ends, she pulls back, turns and walks away, leaving him flabbergasted with a pile of sweets scattered around his shoes.

“What was that for?!” he calls.

“Pick up the candy!” she calls back.

“Minx,” she hears him grumble, and she smirks.

***** 

“I can’t kill her,” James tells Natalia. 

“What are you talking about, of course you can kill her,” she says.

They’re almost out. 

They’ve two more weeks. They’ve gotten all of the information they can from Anita Jones. It had been too easy for Natalia to sneak into the other woman’s home office with a USB and get everything else she needed. 

“I can’t,” James repeats. “Her old man was a Howlie. She’s Gabe’s kid, I can’t kill her.” 

“Then I’ll just do it myself.” 

He opens his mouth to argue, but she cuts him off. 

“We have to stay on-mission,” she says. “We agreed. We stay on mission, this one last time and then we never have to do this again.” 

“So much blood,” James says softly. “Howard and his wife...all the other lives I’ve taken...I’m tired of all of it.” 

_“And soon you will rest,”_ she murmurs to him in Russian, before kissing him. _“You will.”_

She hopes. 

***** 

Anita Jones is an easy kill, and even getting back to Russia is simple.

Everything that happens after is a quick, violent blur. 

Their debriefing isn’t so much a debriefing as a firing squad. They have recordings. Of James talking about cutting his hair. Of them giggling like children about finding a house somewhere in South America and starting a garden there. 

They’d been careless. 

They’d been idiots. 

And they pay for it. 

_“Clearly our test run of sending the Asset on long-term assignment has failed. We shall start anew.”_

James is dragged away and dumped on the floor, beaten to within an inch of his life no matter how hard he fights back, and then dragged to the chair for a memory wipe. Natalia watches as he screams and screams and screams and once it’s done, they pick him up, dump him into a cryo chamber, and turn it on. 

Her superior grabs her by the back of the head and drags her over, holding her face close to the frosted window where James’ eyes stare back at her, completely blank.

“You have forgotten your place,” her superior snarls. _“But you will remember. As surely as your precious Asset has forgotten you, you will remember.”_

And she does.

Through screams and blood and pain.

Natalia Romanoff remembers.

***** 

2006 

She sees a way out in Clint Barton and takes it.

Natalia - Natasha now - is so tired. Tired of Soviets and Hydra. Tired of death and pain. 

Tired of seeing James’ sharp blue eyes when she closes her own.

Natasha Romanoff is just tired. 

“What made you decide to flip?” Clint asks as they sit on the jet back to the States. 

“I lost someone,” she admits quietly. “Nothing has been the same since.” 

He nods, but doesn’t press.

***** 

It takes her another two years to tell Clint the whole story. They’re sitting in the kitchen of his farmhouse late at night, his kids crashed out in their rooms and Laura curled up in Clint’s lap while they talk. 

“His name was James,” Natasha admits. “And he was- a moron.” She smiles fondly. “But handsome. Sweet. Good-hearted.” 

“And he was a spy?” Clint jokes. “He may have been in the wrong business.” 

Laura nudges him. 

“He’s a prisoner of war,” Natasha tells them. “He was. A prisoner of war. Turned into a killer. Memories wiped, and thrown into cryo-freeze until he’s needed.” 

“So why haven’t you gone back to get him?” 

“There’s no getting him,” Natasha says. “Even if I was able to somehow get him out of Russia, he’s been through so many mind wipes that there’s no James in there anymore. To say nothing of the trigger words they’ve implemented since our little vacation on the Hudson River. He’s nothing but the Asset now.” 

Clint doesn’t push it. But he reaches out, resting a hand on her arm. “You ever change your mind and get a bug up your ass to save him, you let me know. I’ll be right there with you.” 

She gives him a grateful grin and they talk about something else.

***** 

2009 

It’s a moment of weakness. 

Natasha should have shot him in the head.

But she finds that she has to try.

“James,” she snaps, as she shields her own asset with her body. “James, it’s me. You don’t have to-” 

The gun fires, and it’s painful. She squints up at him, into his lifeless blue eyes, and she wishes she’d killed him.

She wishes she’d let him kill himself. 

The Asset stares down at her for a long moment, and Natasha thinks this is it. 

This is it.

When he walks away, she squeezes her eyes shut, and screams over the dead body of her mission.

***** 

2014

She says nothing to Steve. 

Steve is in enough pain and turmoil as it is. 

“Be careful, Steve. You might not want to pull on that thread.” 

***** 

2016

The last thing anybody needs is for her to add her own drama to Steve and Tony’s.

“That’s him, isn’t it,” Clint says to her quietly on the tarmac as they fight. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she tells him as she lands a kick to his head, knocking him on his ass. 

“You’re not even gonna try to save him?” Clint asks. 

“I was,” she snaps. “We had him.” 

“They were gonna lock him up and throw away the key,” Clint growls as he gets to his feet. “Deep down, you know that the only person interested in helping Barnes is Rogers.” 

Natasha stares at him. 

“What are you gonna do about it?” 

***** 

2018

There isn’t time in Wakanda. 

And she’s not even certain he recognizes her. 

Not until James gives her a quirk of the lip, a glint in his eye. 

She looks away quickly, and promises herself she’ll find a moment alone with him after all of this is over.

Later, she watches from behind him as he turns to dust. 

***** 

2023

Wakanda is deeply hot in July, and Natasha is glad she’s here as a civilian. 

Getting clearance to visit had been remarkably easy. An explanation (“I’m coming to check on Barnes”), and a promise to make time for lunch with Okoye, had gotten her a ride in, and an offer of a room at the palace for a few nights. 

She steps up to the cozy-looking hut that she knows belongs to James Buchanan Barnes and takes a deep breath, before tapping on the door. 

When it opens, he’s standing there in a plain tunic and pants with a scarf draped over where his left arm would be if he still had it. His hair is long, still, and combed back a little, and he’s tanned; not as overly-muscled as she remembers, and that’s a good thing.

A small smile quirks his lips when he sees her. The same one he’d given her before the snap.

_“Not that I’m not happy to see you,”_ he says in Russian. _“But what are you doing here?”_

Natasha smiles at him and reaches out, gently tugging a lock of hair that’s fallen into his eyes. _“First thing’s first,”_ she says. 

His small smile turns into a big one. _“I’ll get the scissors.”_

END

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the lyrics of Nick Drake's "One of These Things First."


End file.
